Why Do We Resist the Hurt?

The obstacles to healing are the same as the obstacles to prayer or contemplation. The body gives us access to the truth of the present state of ​our physical reality. The body lets us know what is going on, and it does this through a process called, “awareness,” a process that connects us with the felt-sense in the body, which is like tuning in to a particular sensory language.

Often, this kind of awareness process is not congruent with what we tell ourselves and hide fro ourselves as our true state of well-being. Across our years growing up and over time, we learn how to adapt around ourselves and literally bypass all sorts of uncomfortable feelings that attempt to flow through the body, for the sake of survival and functioning.

This “what sounds very simple” tendency creates pockets full of contained charge in the body and eventually disturbs the actual flow of the life force itself. We learn to avoid these parts of ourselves and do so for as long as we can, until they begin to affect the body and signal physical discomfort and pain. Instead of turning towards the pain and becoming aware of its presence, we are highly conditioned to avert our attention from what is perceived to be harmful for us, and instead, turn our attention to something else we are more attracted to, to what is feeling comfortable and feeling good.

That said, there are fundamental ways to engage with our bodies and respond; there are ways to learn to understand it deeply, to study how it is designed, and to come to have compassion for its purpose and what the design itself, serves.

We can then learn to make a choice — we can become deeply connected with our somatic, our body’s sensate reality. We can access its intelligence. We can learn about it. And we can choose to turn towards the parts of ourselves that need us. That needs us to hear it and to consciously participate in the reconciliation of the aversions and attractions it holds at all times, each day, in every moment.